Digital transformation has made the traditional perimeter-based network defense obsolete. Your employees and partners expect to be able to collaborate and access organizational resources from anywhere, on virtually any device, without impacting their productivity. Customers expect personalized experiences that demonstrate you understand them and can adapt quickly to their evolving interests. Companies need to be able to move with agility, adapting quickly to changing market conditions and take advantage of new opportunities. Companies embracing this change are thriving, leaving those who don’t in their wake.
As organizations drive their digital transformation efforts, it quickly becomes clear that the approach to securing the enterprise needs to be adapted to the new reality. The security perimeter is no longer just around the on-premises network. It now extends to SaaS applications used for business critical workloads, hotel and coffee shop networks your employees are using to access corporate resources while traveling, unmanaged devices your partners and customers are using to collaborate and interact with, and IoT devices installed throughout your corporate network and inside customer locations. The traditional perimeter-based security model is no longer enough.
The traditional firewall (VPN security model) assumed you could establish a strong perimeter, and then trust that activities within that perimeter were “safe.” The problem is today’s digital estates typically consist of services and endpoints managed by public cloud providers, devices owned by employees, partners, and customers, and web-enabled smart devices that the traditional perimeter-based model was never built to protect. We’ve learned from both our own experience, and the customers we’ve supported in their own journeys, that this model is too cumbersome, too expensive, and too vulnerable to keep going.
We can’t assume there are “threat free” environments. As we digitally transform our companies, we need to transform our security model to one which assumes breach, and as a result, explicitly verifies activities and automatically enforces security controls using all available signal and employs the principle of least privilege access. This model is commonly referred to as “Zero Trust.”
Today, we’re publishing a new white paper to help you understand the core principles of Zero Trust along with a maturity model, which breaks down requirements across the six foundational elements, to help guide your digital transformation journey.
Download the Microsoft Zero Trust Maturity Model today!
Learn more about Zero Trust and Microsoft Security.
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To learn more about how you can protect your time and empower your team, check out the cybersecurity awareness page this month.
